VOICE OF DETROIT: The city's independent newspaper, unbossed and unbought

Update Feb. 13, 2013: According to Maria Miller of the Prosecutor’s Office, “Charles Jones was found guilty by a jury of Second Degree Murder and Perjury. Jones was found not guilty of Felon in Possession and Felony Firearm. Jones will be sentenced before Judge Skutt on  March 13, 2014 at 9:00 a.m.  The verdict for Owens has not announced at this time.” VOD story on the verdict(s) will be forthcoming.

Moran fingers Chauncey Owens for both deaths; he is also prosecuting killer cop Joseph Weekley, Jr. in Aiyana’s killing

 ‘Confession’ video shown at trial is highly conflicted

“Jail-house snitches” take stand

 Analysis

 By Diane Bukowski 

Feb. 9, 2014 

DETROIT – “Because of his actions, not only is a 17-year-old dead, but Aiyana Jones is dead.”

Defense attorney Leon Weiss (top) and Asst. Prosecutor Robert Moran (bottom) during preliminary exam on Charles Jones in June, 2012.

These were the words of Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Robert Moran in his closing arguments at the first-degree murder trial of Chauncey Owens, accused of killing Jerean Blake May 14, 2010. But Moran is also prosecuting Detroit police officer Joseph Weekley for “involuntary manslaughter” for shooting 7-year-old Aiyana Jones in the head with an MP-5 submachine gun on May 16, 2010, during a military-style police raid filmed by “The First 48” reality TV show. Police said they were seeking Owens.

So who killed Aiyana – Owens or Weekley? Why is the same man prosecuting both?

“The judge should have called a mistrial then and there,” Cornell Squires, a paralegal with We the People for the People, reacted.

Charles Jones, in shock the morning Aiyana was shot to death by Detroit police, stands next to bloody couch where she died May 16, 2010. Behind his head is the shattered windown through which police threw an incendiary stun grenade just prior to shooting the little girl in the head. Photo/Diane Bukowski

Moran’s words spoke volumes about the motivation of the police and prosecution in pursuing charges not only against Owens, but against Aiyana’s father Charles Jones 17 months later. Jones was ordered to crawl through bits of his child’s blood and brains after she was rushed out of their poor east-side flat by another killer cop, Kata-Ante Taylor, according to testimony in Weekley’s trial last June. That trial ended with a hung jury, but Weekley has yet to be re-tried after four years.

Weekley’s pre-trial, scheduled for Feb. 6, was once again postponed in a clear effort to await the results of the verdicts against Owens and Jones. The Jones jury is to hear closing arguments and begin deliberations Feb. 10, while the Owens jury has already brought back a “sealed verdict,” to be opened when the Jones case is complete. Weekley has been free on bond since his arraignment on charges of involuntary manslaughter, while Owens and Jones have languished in the Wayne County Jail since their arrests.

Before being subjected to hours of interrogation, Owens, arrested in an upstairs flat wearing only his trunks, was forced to sit on the blood-soaked couch where the little girl died as she slept with her grandmother, according to court files. Throughout the subsequent police interrogation, he was dressed in a plastic see through coat of some kind, and he repeatedly asked for his family to bring him clothing.  Court records say that earlier police officers taunted him by putting a shower cap on his head.

Houses where Shrron Hurt and friend Jay lived across the street from Jones family,

Owens’ brother Shrron Hurt, who testified at the trial, lived across the street from the Jones family. Hurt testified that he was at the scene of Blake’s killing with an individual named “Chris” on his moped. Owens and one other witness, Charles Howard (in a written statement not admitted at the trial) said Hurt killed Blake. If police would have charged Hurt instead of Owens, they would have had to admit that in the rush to judgment required by “48 Hours,” they raided not only the wrong flat but the wrong house, killing a seven-year-old little girl.

‘CONFESSION’ VIDEO SHOWN

The Owens interrogation, shown at the trial on video on Feb. 6, ended with a confession to Blake’s killing, but only after interrogators Sgts. Kenneth Gardner and Theophilus Williams belatedly let Owens discover that his little niece had died. Previously in that interrogation and during an earlier one by Sgt. LaTanya Brooks, Owens adamantly denied he killed anyone and said his brother Shrron Hurt, known as “Chinaman,” killed Blake.

Sgt. Kenneth Gardner was evidently also a star for A & E’s “The First 48,” since this photo, like that of Joseph Weekley, comes from that show’s website.

“I’m really pissed off about this,” Owens says in the beginning. “My brother’s little daughter got hurt [referring to Charles Jones, his brother in common law]. I’ve tried to cover up for my brother [referring to Hurt] too much.” He asks the interrogators repeatedly about Aiyana’s condition, but they claim [falsely] that they don’t know.

“My brother [Hurt] is from around here,” Owens says. “There’s all these guys, little gangs, little cliques, whatever. . . .Chinaman broke it down. His story was that he was on his moped at the store and [got into it] with a little boy. Chinaman pulled up to the house on Lillibridge, took the van, and took his gun with him. Later he went to Centerline where his wife is at.”

At one point in the video, Owens says he told Hurt, who called him afterwards to tell him to get out of town, “I’m not running from my home. I didn’t do shit, I’m not going no place, I swear to God on my mama’s grave.”

Owens’ defense attorney David Cripps

Owens’ defense attorney David Cripps pointed out that Owens went home and was sleeping in bed when police raided his flat and the lower flat where Aiyana Jones was present with her grandmother, great aunt, uncle, two toddler brothers, and her mother and father. He said Hurt himself testified that he concealed his moped in his friend Jay’s house and had his wife come pick him up to take him to their home in suburban Centerline.

Gardner repeatedly told Owens he should confess because “there had already been enough pain” in his family with the injury of Aiyana, and that the family would blame him and become “alienated” from him if he tried to put the killing off on Hurt. Owens repeatedly asks to talk to his wife, LaKrystal Sanders.

“I love her so much,” he says.

Video: Jones did not provide gun to kill Blake

Later, Gardner calls Sanders on his cell phone, putting it on speaker. She is heard telling Owens, “’Yana’s dead.” Owens breaks down weeping and begins rambling. He ends by saying he and a group of people were walking down Lillibridge when Chinaman came by and said there had been an incident at the store and he needed help. Owens says the group went to the store and that a young man in the group unexpectedly handed him a gun.

LaKrystal Sanders is at right in this photo of Aiyana Jones family at rally in March, 2013. Her mother Dominika is at left, with grandmother Mertilla Jones behind her, and Aiyana’s maternal grandfather Jimmie Stanley at top.

In the video, Owens did not finger Jones for giving him the gun involved, as the “unbiased” major media, clearly operating on police leaks, has reported for four years, since one week after Aiyana’s death. Sgt. Gardner tries twice to get Owens to identify Charles Jones as the shooter, and also as the gun’s provider, but Owens says adamantly he did not identify Jones, but Chinaman as the killer and the young man as the one who gave him the gun.

Owens says he fired off the gun once, in the air as a warning shot, but says it must have gone off as he lifted his arm, demonstrating by raising his arm.

“I never wanted this to happen, I never wanted nobody to be killed,” he says. He describes a chaotic scene at the liquor store, with dozens of people present milling around.

Where is the second bullet?

All witnesses who said they were at the scene described TWO shots, leaving open the possibility that a second gun was fired. The murder weapon was identified as a .357 revolver; revolvers do not leave casings. However, police officers and evidence technicians at the scene, who appear to have conducted a rather cursory investigation according to one officer’s testimony, did not find a second bullet. Blake’s autopsy report shows that only ONE bullet entered his body.

Where is the second bullet from the scene of Jerean Blake’s death?

After breaking Owens down to that point, Sgt. Gardner tells him he will “feel better” once he confesses. Then Sgt. Williams writes down a statement that does not include any of Owens’ allegations earlier in the session that his brother was responsible. Owens, rambling and intermittently weeping about Aiyana’s death, merely glances at it before signing it.

“So who acted guilty?” Cripps asked the jury in his closing statement. He recalled Hurt’s testimony that he put his moped inside “Jay’s” house, then called his wife to pick him up and take him out to their home in Centerline in Macomb County. Cripps alleged that Hurt gave two associates, known as “Ant” and “Anthony Bruce” the murder weapon as they sat outside his Lillibridge residence in a Black car and Hurt admittedly talked to them.

Photo of “Birdman” moped/scooter.

Cripps revealed, with no objection from Moran, that the prosecution has had in its possession from the beginning a written statement from witness Charles Howard that two confederates of Hurt’s, “Jay” and “Dee,” told him that Hurt said he killed Blake after Blake tried to steal his “Birdman” moped. Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Richard Skutt barred Howard from testifying to that statement, ruling it was multiple hearsay.

But Howard did testify that he, Jay, and Dee knew Hurt well because they sold drugs for him out of Jay’s house across the street from the Jones family’s home, next door to Hurt’s residence. He said he had known Hurt since 2002. During testimony at Weekley’s trial in June 2013, officers testified that the neighborhood was known to be “drug-infested.” Hurt has pled guilty to a felony charge of attempted possession of methamphetamine and ecstasy pills in Detroit in 2009, as well as attempted assaulting and resisting a police officer in 2006, among other violations in a multi-county area.

Hurt was known in the neighborhood for showing off his white moped, Howard testified, swerving it through the streets repeatedly. Blake’s mother Lyvonne Cargill earlier admitted to giving police a statement that “kids, I don’t know who” at the scene of Blake’s killing told her someone nicknamed “Scooter” had killed her son.

So who killed Jerean Blake?

“Jail-house snitches” testify 

As expected, two jail-house snitches took the stand to testify against Owens and Jones.

Jay Schlenkerman testifies at Charles Jones’ preliminary exam in Jan. 2012.

The first, Jay Allen Schlenkerman, was incarcerated with Owens in 2011 on a domestic violence charge that was originally termed a “kidnapping” by Brownstown Township police. Police reports on the case indicated that he repeatedly beat his live-in girl-friend about the head and in the genitals, and forced her into the bathtub where he urinated on her, not allowing her to leave their house for three days. According to medical records, the beatings resulted in a closed head injury, leakage of brain fluid from her nose, and severe post-traumatic stress syndrome. That case was one of several such assaults on women for which Schlenkerman has been charged.

The Wayne County Prosecutor’s office dropped the charges to misdemeanor domestic violence and later reduced Schlenkerman’s probationary sentence after he told the prosecutor he had repeated conversations with Owens in which Owens told him about his and Charles Jones’ involvement in Blake’s killing.

Schlenkerman was set to be sentenced in a third OUIL case and on a fourth habitual offender charge Feb. 6. Jones’ defense attorney Leon Weiss and Cripps both noted the pending sentencing, which could have ranged up to life in prison, as a likely motive for Schlenkerman’s testimony. Records just posted from the Michigan Department of Corrections show Schlenkerman received sentences of six and 1/2 to 10 years on the OUIL count and a “fleeing and eluding police” count. He had boasted at the trial that the MDOC told him they were recommending a 23-month mininum.

Quasim Raqid with his murder victim Shelley Hilliard, who was dismembered.

Cripps got him to admit that he lied during that trial, saying he did not drive a car in the case, and had not driven a car since 2002, despite numerous other OUIL’s on his record since.

Schlenkerman repeated some of his testimony at Jones’ preliminary exam, but in not as much detail. He did say that he reported Owen’s “confession” to him to Wayne County Deputy Richard Donahee. Donahee took the stand on the final day of testimony, however, and denied that Schlenkerman had done any such thing. On cross, he admitted the two “lived together” in an eight-man protective custody unit at the Dickerson jail.

The second witness, Qasim Raqib, who is serving a life sentence for second-degree murder, admitted that he had signed written agreements to testify against his co-defendant, another prisoner, and Charles Jones, in exchange for reduction of his charges from first-degree murder. He was involved in the killing and dismemberment of a transgender teen, Shelley Hilliard, who was to testify against him and others in a drug sting.  He claimed Jones “told me about a gun he gave Mr. Owens, and that he [Owens] killed a little boy with the gun.”

Judge Richard Skutt/Facebook photo

On cross, Weiss got Raquib to admit that he was a “lying murderer.”

At the close of testimony Feb. 6, both defense attorneys moved for directed verdicts from Judge Skutt, saying the prosecution had not met their burden of proof for the charges of First Degree Murder (for both defendants), felony firearms, and perjury. Skutt, however, denied their motions, saying the juries would have to make the determinations.

Two Black jurors were excused from the 14-member Owens jury as alternates. The jury reportedly returned a sealed verdict after deliberating all day Feb. 7. The Jones jury is to return for closing arguments and deliberations Feb. 10 at 9 a.m.

One of Dominika Jones’ favorite photos of Aiyana, just posted on Facebook. There is absolutely NO excuse for equating growing police violence and murder directed against poor communities with the violence born of poverty and despair which takes place within those communities.

Detroit freeway interchange; half of Detroit’s drivers cannot afford car insurance according to studies.

Where you live matters more than how you drive

By Justin Hyde

Motoramic

February 5, 2014

(VOD: Thanks to John Kavanagh for sending this article along.)

Detroit police stop car. If the driver has no insurance, he/she is ticketed. If the driver cannot afford to pay the ticket(s), his/her license is suspended. IT’S KNOWN AS ‘DRIVING DIRTY.’

Auto insurance rates have long been one of the abiding mysteries of car ownership. Despite the overall decline in crashes over the past decade, auto insurance rates have steadily risen, driven by what insurers say are higher vehicle repair and health-care costs. Yet a new study also shows that no matter your driving record, a simple change of zip code can cause large swings in how much you pay

The survey by NerdWallet looked for the highest and lowest annual auto insurance rates in 125 cities, using a profile of a 26-year-old man insuring a 2012 Toyota Camry with a $500 deductible, living in an urban zip code. Seven of the 10 lowest-cost cities were in North Carolina, where a unique set of laws caps rates and personal-injury awards while giving regulators broad control over price increases.

As for the most expensive cities, Detroit’s car insurance rates exist on a separate plane from the rest of the country, with a price tag more than double the next most-expensive locale. Michigan requires insurers to offer unlimited medical benefits, which pushes up rates to begin with. Detroit’s high rate of auto thefts and overtaxed police force add to insurers’ worries as well.

Whether this accident was the driver’s fault or not, his insurance rates will skyrocket.

And the cost becomes a vicious cycle; the rates have been so high for so long many lower-income residents can’t afford coverage, with some studies finding more than half of the city’s drivers go without auto insurance despite state laws. The problem has become so acute that newly elected mayor Mike Duggan vowed during his campaign to start a city-owned auto insurance company to provide affordable coverage to Detroit residents.

The rest of the list shows little to no correlation between population size or congestion; while Washington, DC, consistently ranks as the worst city for driving in the nation, its average auto insurance premiums didn’t break into the top 30. All of the top 10 cities hail from states with no-fault insurance, a system that raises insurers’ costs, and other legal quirks often fuel further increases. These areas also suffer from high rates of uninsured motorists, and a fair amount of severe weather.

There’s only so much an individual in one of these cities can do to lessen these rates. Most companies offer discounts for shoppers who know what they are. A good driving record helps; some insurers now offer electronic driving monitors that can lead to discounts for safe driving. Even an improved credit score can lead to lower rates. Other than that, the only sure path to savings might be a move to North Carolina.

Photo of plane crash involved from another newspaper; apparently Charlevoix County News dumped story and photographer, a hazard in the free-lance journalism business.

By Mitchell Jon MacKay

February 4, 2014

(VOD: Damien Leist, working for the Charlevoix County News, was arrested and charged for taking photos of the scene of a plane crash. Story at http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/d29a5f4648e64f40be967e6ccb61e30d/MI–Airplane-Wreckage-Footage. Also see the story of VOD editor Diane Bukowski’s arrest and felony convictions at http://freedianebukowski.org. Thanks to Jimmy Sabin for sending this article to VOD.)

Charlevoix County Prosecutor Alan Telgenhof in casual apparel.

PROSECUTOR CHARGED WITH DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, bad checks, property damage, charges reporter with taking photos of a crime scene. Wait, didn’t reporters always take pictures of crime scenes? Well, yes, but that was before an obscure law having to do with gravesite indignities that the current prosecutor of Charlevoix County, Michigan dug up from presumably computer search because he had no idea the law even existed. But then he presumably didn’t know he couldn’t beat up his wife, write bad checks or destroy property either, so….

This is a matter of relativity. Not long ago State Police employee Bill Smith, commander of the Gladwin post was busted for drunk driving in Sault Ste. Marie but got off through a complicit judge; trooper Aaron Sweeney of the Petoskey post was busted for domestic violence; a former Charlevoix deputy was charged with domestic violence on M-66 – it goes on and on. And a reporter is busted for taking photos. This is known as malfeasance, using the law and the uniform for nefarious purposes. Happens every day.

Michael Morton, exonerated of the death of his wife through DNA avidence after 25 years in prison,

Way down there in Texas a former prosecutor was recently found guilty of malfeasance for failing to record exculpatory evidence in the Michael Morton trial which begot Morton 25 years in prison. The ex-prosecutor, most recently a judge – there’s a scandal in itself – was disbarred, fined, ordered to community service, and received ten days in jail of which he did five with good behavior and…that’s all. Twenty-five years of an innocent man’s life begot five days in jail and loss of license which he can reapply for in five years.

I know of a certain judge who did five years of disbarment for misappropriation of trust funds but he certainly never did anything so heinous as photographing dead bodies. That takes an especially diabolical paparazzi. Fortunately our local cops and prosecutors are on the job, even if some of these are on the docket.

Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-MI, right, Thad Cochran, R-MS, second from right, and Senator John Hoeven, R-ND, center, just after Congress gave its final approval to the sweeping five-year farm bill, Tuesday, February 4, 2014. At left are Senator John Boozman, R-Ark., and Senator Amy Klobuchar, D-MN. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

But then, we have to allow for hypocrisy too. Well, like congresswoman Debbie Stabenow for instance who campaigned on the internet for salvaging the SNAP program of food assistance, then appeared for photos with the congratulatory promoters of cutting food assistance and rewarding agriculture with more corporate welfare, people like those Koch brothers. That photo should be illegal. Where would America be without hypocrisy? The US Constitution upheld slavery – yes, it actually says it in that short document. The US Constitution upheld Indian displacement – yep it’s there too. What’s not there in that hallowed parchment is separation of church and state; the framers didn’t want to go there nor did they want to deal with the precept of presumed innocent until proven guilty – those items were added argumentum ad hominem in the course of interpretation thereafter. Well, sort of like “Citizens United” with nary a citizen voting.

What we have here, friends and neighbors, is the burgeoning police state that disallows anyone, reporter or public from “interfering” with police actions. They don’t want proof positive of any malfeasance. That’s what this is all about. First it’s money, then it’s power trip, then it’s secrecy, in that order. Isn’t the latter what the whistleblowing chronicles are all about? And isn’t the former what bureaucracy is all about? The middle ground is the benefit of putting on the uniform so that clemency is pretty much a done deal when officials go afoul of the law.

Look, if a prosecutor, a judge and a cop can break the law with impunity but a news reporter can be arrested for exercising the 1^st Amendment, we may know there’s something very wrong here in America. And this is not big bad Chicago, Los Angeles or Detroit; this is Charlevoix county, rural Michigan. But the coliseum games continue unabated because it’s established in rule of law, due process. Watch this upcoming contest for Circuit judge of this county, which will prove to be a real sideshow, a freak show tragicomedy of errors but for the only reputable candidate to date, Roy Hayes III. It’s time for another American Revolution, folks. The reason is exactly the same as ever: arrogate oppression.

©2014 Mitchell Jon MacKay

Related:

http://theprettylieortheuglytruth.blogspot.com/2013/04/telgenhof.html

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/04/justice/exonerated-prisoner-update-michael-morton/

http://www.thenation.com/blog/178247/farm-bill-cuts-8-billion-food-stamps-preserves-handouts-koch-industries

Detroiters march from Martin Luther King, Jr. High School to celebrate MLK Day in 2011.

• It is the general consensus among white people that Detroit’s problem is, too many Blacks. Michigan’s governor has a solution: flood the city with upscale green card holders. “An infusion of global migrants would enable Detroit’s corporate masters to market the metropolis as a ‘cosmopolitan’ urban cocktail, as opposed to the nation’s largest ‘Chocolate City.’”
• “Corporate ethnic manipulators like Snyder want to indoctrinate a new crop of immigrants to the inherent inferiority of Black Americans, whose cities must be saved by culturally superior foreigners.” 

By BAR executive editor Glen Ford

February 5, 2014

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is a crude and vicious racist who verbalizes what most white people believe, but won’t say in mixed company: What’s wrong with Detroit, is an excess of Black people. Snyder proposes to bring 50,000 immigrants to Detroit over five years on special EB-2 visas, on the theory that the newcomers’ entrepreneurial zeal will have transformative effects on the city. Starting with an initial 5,000 immigrants, “Snyder’s List” would expand to 15,000 in the final year, with Detroit accounting for more than a third of the nation’s total EB-2 authorization. Call it “Operation Afro-Dilution.”

Gov. Snyder is a Republican, a political breed known to recoil at the prospect of the USA overrun by foreigners of the darker kind. However, Snyder’s specially summoned migrants would be flooding into territory inhabited mainly by an even more despised demographic: African Americans, who make up 82 percent of Detroit’s 700,000 people. The current Black concentration is far too thick to attract sufficient white families to effect a profound racial transformation in the near term. Consider this: If a rise in a town’s Black population to 20 or 25 percent is enough to push many whites past the “tipping point” into flight, how low do African American numbers have to get before a city definitively “tips” the other way.

An infusion of global migrants would enable Detroit’s corporate masters to market the metropolis as a “cosmopolitan” urban cocktail, as opposed to the nation’s largest “Chocolate City.” In the language of White-Speak, that’s definitely an upgrade, a boost in marketable assets, all around – which is what late-stage, finance-dominated capitalism is all about.

As shown in video above, whites have flooded downtown Detroit to play in places like the Campus Martius skating rink, but the population remains 82 percent Black.

“The current Black concentration is far too thick to attract sufficient white families to effect a profound racial transformation in the near term.”

But, Gov. Synder is going to have to compete for his share of immigrant “pioneers” (as white American settlers in ghetto locales once described themselves). Other too-Black Midwestern cities, including Chicago, St. Louis and Dayton, Ohio, have the same idea, attaching a premium to immigrants of a certain type (educated, relatively affluent).

Slavemaster Gov. Rick Snyder goes after Michigan’s Black cities first with PA 4, now PA 436.

Back in the post-Civil War era of breakneck U.S. industrialization, European immigrants didn’t even have to speak English to rate a sign-on bonus, free transportation across the Atlantic and company-built housing near their new jobs in American cities. For others, there was free land, confiscated from newly dead Indians. English-speaking African Americans, many of whom had been artisans and industrial workers under slavery, were turned away from factory and homestead. Black folks’ assigned “place” was at the bottom of the racial hierarchy, wherever that happened to be at the time. Nothing has changed, in that regard – except that modern white society determinedly denies that segregation is its favored way of life. Where that not true, of course, Detroit would not be 82 percent Black.

Black folks know full well that Snyder’s immigration scheme is designed to dilute Black numbers and, eventually, make Detroit a more attractive place for native white habitation. But, in mixed company, politically conscious Blacks are careful not to appear jingoistic, like the other Ugly Americans. Rev. Charles Williams II of the National Action Network told the New York Times that “he believed Detroit, as well as other Midwestern states, should be pro-immigration. ‘However,’ he said, ‘I will say, on the other end of this, I think it’s a little ambitious for Governor Snyder to put together a plan to induce more population when still we have to work on double-digit unemployment and high poverty that’s already in our city right now.” That’s putting it mildly. Thirty-eight percent of Detroiters live below the poverty line, the vast majority of them Black.

“Other too-Black Midwestern cities, including Chicago, St. Louis and Dayton, Ohio, have the same idea.”

Changing U.S. population patterns dictate that Blacks strive for solidarity – or, at least, healthy political relations – with immigrant groups, especially Latinos. African Americans must resist being goaded into ethnic confrontations that profit only powerful corporations. However, Snyder and his ilk are attempting to use EB-2 immigrants – the bulk of whom are relatively privileged people from India, China, Mexico and the Philippines – as demographic weapons to break up African American population concentrations. In the process, they are implicitly defaming Blacks as the negative side of the human ledger – The Problem – and non-Blacks as The Solution. This is an assault that must be answered with full throated roar.

Slaves built America.

Snyder isn’t just preaching to white Americans, who are fully conversant in racially coded language; he is propagandizing the targeted immigrant populations, as well, telling them they are a better class of people than the current residents of Detroit. Snyder and his cohorts are essentially assigning the newcomers a racial mission: to bring their supposedly “superior” cultural attributes to uplift (and ultimately replace) an “inferior” Black social environment.

Now that western Europeans no longer view the U.S. as a Promised Land, the American mythologists must tailor the Founding Lies to a darker audience. Gov. Snyder updates the old Ellis Island story to fit the current influx from the global East and South. “Isn’t that how we made our country great, through immigrants?” said Mr. Snyder, hawking his plan for Detroit. No, that’s not how it happened. The United States was made rich by Black slaves, whose pre-Civil War value exceeded all other national “assets” except the land, itself – which was, of course, stolen from the Native Americans. The descendants of European immigrants, from the Mayflower to the 20^th century’s vaunted Melting Pot, somehow imagine they are God’s gift to the continent – to the planet! – but their most important contributions to the enrichment of the New World were smallpox-infected blankets and chains.

“Snyder and his ilk are attempting to use EB-2 immigrants as demographic weapons to break up African American population concentrations.”

Corporate ethnic manipulators like Snyder want to indoctrinate a new crop of immigrants to the inherent inferiority of Black Americans, whose cities must be saved by culturally superior foreigners. This is how U.S. rulers prepare for the year 2043, when the U.S. is projected to become a majority-minority country – by inculcating the newcomers with the same racist worldview as the previous white overlords.

Protest outside courthouse during Detroit bankruptcy hearing Oct. 28, 2013.

Gov. Snyder bragged that he could achieve ethnic cleansing on the cheap. “Here’s a non-cash way to significantly accelerate the comeback of Detroit” – meaning, he has no intention of spending any money on the existing Detroit population. However, the week before, Snyder announced that he was asking the state legislature to provide $350 million to shore up the city’s retiree pension plan and save the art collection. Snyder and Republican lawmakers have long waged a starvation campaign against Detroit, depriving the city of revenue sharing and other funds in order to accelerate its fiscal collapse. Now that the local electorate has been disenfranchised (as has a majority of the state’s Black population), and total corporate dominion appears imminent, Snyder turns the money faucet back on. Should corporate plans sour (see Tom Stephens, “Judge Rhodes to Detroit: Don’t Pay the Banksters,” in this issue of BAR), then the screws will be tightened.

If, by dint of sheer human will, or just the fact of not having anywhere to else go, Black folks can maintain a super-majority in Detroit, that will be a great victory. When someone is trying to kill you, to live is to triumph.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.    

War on Black youth locally and nationally

Renisha McBride, Michael Haynes, Aiyana Jones, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis only a few examples

By Diane Bukowski

Analysis

Feb. 4, 2014

McKenzie Cochran, 25

SOUTHFIELD, MI — As depicted above in two videos, McKenzie Cochran, 25, a Black Ferndale resident, was likely murdered by white security guards at Southfield’s Northland Mall on Jan. 28. Pepper spray, combined with a guard’s knee on Cochran’s back as he cried out, “I can’t breathe,” and other restraints applied by multiple guards leave little room for speculation.

This is despite the callous reaction of Northland Mall management shown in the second video, and caveats from the notorious Oakland County Medical Examiner and Prosecutor’s offices that their investigation of Cochran’s death will likely take a long time.

VOD will be contacting Southfield mayor Brenda Lawrence, who is currently running for State Representative, regarding her plans for a response to this latest death, as part of an upcoming story on the killings and beatings of African-Americans at the hands of a predominantly white Southfield police force over the recent period. Those killings are being exposed by the group “We the People for the People.”

Michael Haynes II

Detroiters have seen the tactics employed in Cochran’s death before, when Kalvin Porter, a 34-year-old electrician and father of six, died in 1999, protecting the honor of his young daughter. Gas station attendants Fadhel Mazeb, 46, and Adel Altam, 26, at Gratiot and Mack sat on top of him and cut off his ability to breathe. Five of his children watched as he died. The attendants in Porter’s case walked after Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Maggie Drake dismissed charges against one and a jury acquitted the second.

More recently, Michael Haynes II, 24, an unarmed Black youth, was shot to death by gas station attendent Ibrahim Saleh in March, 2012 in a dispute over the price of condoms. Saleh is serving a 29-month to 15 year prison sentence after Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Michael Hathaway dismissed first-degree murder charges against him and a jury found him guilty of manslaughter and felony firearms.

Renisha McBride, 19

Cochran’s death also happened in the wake of Dearborn Heights resident Theodore Wafer’s slaughter of 19-year-old Detroiter Renisha McBride on his front porch Nov. 2, 2013. He was not arrested by Dearborn Heights police until after Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy insisted on further investigation. Wafer is scheduled for trial on a second-degree murder charge, June 2, 2014 in front of Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Qiana Denise Lillard, with a final conference April 4, 2014.

This Friday, Feb. 7, at 9 a.m., Detroit police officer Joseph Weekley will appear in court for a pre-trial hearing in front of Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Cynthia Gray Hathaway on charges of manslaughter and reckless use of a firearm in the death of seven-year-old Aiyana Jones during a violent police raid on her home May 16, 2010.

Aiyana Jones, 7

Meanwhile, on the national front, the trial of Michael Dunn in the killing of Jordan Davis is beginning this week. Dunn, who is white, killed Davis at a gas station allegedly during an argument over loud music. He has been charged with first degree murder. CNN has more on that in the first video at the bottom of this story.

It is evident that Black youth are at the center of a war on Black America that has been intensifying practically to the level of slavery days.

It evident in the massive incarceration of Black people depicted in Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow,” in the four Detroit police Gestapo raids on areas inhabited by poverty-stricken Blacks since Nov. 2013, and  in the takeover of the nation’s largest Black-majority city, Detroit, by banks and corporations using Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and the Jones Day law firm as their puppets.

Kenny Snodgrass’ commentary on the second video below of a protest after the Haynes killing raises answers as to what must be done to fight back.

Jordan Davis’ parents on CNN talk about his killing by Michael Dunn

Justice For Michael Haynes II – – A No Struggle, No Development! Production By KennySnod *

Published on Apr 15, 2012

Kenneth Snodgrass

We peacefully protest in the name of justice for the family of Michael “Fat Mike” Haynes II and the Detroit Black Community. We protesting against both institutional and community violence. We are protesting against the conditions that breed crime and violence in Detroit and across our country, which are rooted in our economic powerlessness. We protest the disrespect by racist whites and foreign merchants of us and our communities. We feel violence and crime in our communities is rooted in our dependency on a broken economy, our mis-education, poor leadership, our economically depressed communities and families.

Our peaceful protest is aims at closing the BP gas station on Fenkell & Meyers, and to demonstrate a Black Man’s life is worth more than some petty merchandise. We are venting our emotions while coming together as Detroiters to fight against the problems that have created so much senseless violence in our cities. We declare “WE” will be answer to the problems confronting our communities through collective unity; from collective unity we can accomplish any goals we set to achieve. Turn Tragedies Into A Triumphs – Join Us!

A No Struggle, No Development! Production By Kenny Snodgrass, Activist, Photographer, Videographer, Author of From Victimization To Empowerment…
www.trafford.com/07-0913  eBook available at www.ebookstore.sony.com
YouTube – I have over 265 community videos and over 85,000 Hits
on my YouTube channel at www.YouTube.com/KennySnod 

Video above: Detroit : Making It Better for You (HD) from Kyong Park on Vimeo.

By Juanita Bryant, Community Activist & Volunteer Election Challenger WCCA1JB@aol.com

Opinion

Feb. 4, 2014

The video [above] is more FICTION than non-fiction because for the last 20 years or more everyone who has been actively involved in the Detroit Metro area community and the political arena in Detroit, State of Michigan, Wayne County and the United States must recognize that 99.9% of the things mentioned in this video have been occurring since World War II.

Then the takeover of residential communities throughout City of Detroit to displace or force homeowners to move out of the City of Detroit started after 1967 and then the major foreclosure crisis in 2003-2008 and the down fall of numerous mortgage and financial corporations began. How many people realize that federal home loans were done outside of the City of Detroit as a means to encourage individuals to purchase homes in the suburban cities. This became true for the predominantly populated Black urban areas.

How many Habitat for Humanity Homes were even built in these heavily populated Black urban areas? After the election of President Obama in 2008, when he began putting in HUD programs to block the foreclosure impact that was part of this plan — some of the major financial institutions —Bank of America, Washington Mortgage, Indy Bank, Option One, Countrywide, Chase, U S Bank Home Mortgaging, Saxon, Home Q Financing, Homecomings, Wilshire Credit, AMC, ASC, Telcom Credit Union, Nationwide, Fannie Mae, Fannie Mac, Select Portfolio Servicing, Citimortgage, Litton, U. S. Home Bank, First Franklin, Credit Union One, Midland Mortgage Company, Ocwen, Chase Manhattan Bank, Flagship Mortgage Company, Accredited Home Lending, Michigan Mutual, Wachovia, Prudential, HSBC, Wells Fargo, GMAC Mortgage, Fifth Third, – to name a few, refused to participate in these programs. The reason for their plan was to displace and destroy these urban cities.

The election rigging which occurred in 2000 – 2013 was also a part of their plan to place in political offices, including numerous judicial positions from the circuit courts, district courts, state and even federal the courts, the individuals needed to ensure these planned projects, programs, and corruption would not be STOPPED. In December of 2009, President Obama sent millions of dollars to the State of Michigan for distribution to the urban cities in this state that were facing some financial difficulties — HOWEVER, that money was kept in the State of Michigan Treasury.

Former Detroit City Councilwoman JoAnn Watson at rally against banks takeover of Detroit May 4, 2013.

In January of 2010, a meeting was called by the Detroit City Council that included the Detroit Planning & Development Departments and, federal representatives from HUD and the U.S. Department of Justice plus several Detroit residents and some of the impacted nonprofits which included several community development centers and those providing public services from education, tutoring, mentoring, job training skills, etc. The purpose for this meeting with over 300 people in attendance to discuss the $57,522,974.85 total of approved HUD dollars from 1995 through 2010 that the City of Detroit never released to these non-profits and in some cases notified the non-profits so the appropriate contracts could be established. To obtain that complete list, please click on this link:

http://www.detroitmi.gov/Portals/0/docs/planning/pdf/Consolidated%20Plan/Proposed%20Change%20to%20CDBG%20Consolidated%20Plan%20Report.pdf

The money was never released to the non-profits because the Mayor of Detroit at that time Dave Bing wanted to use those funds to demolish neighborhoods in Detroit instead of releasing from to the community groups for rebuilding neighborhoods and educating the residents of this City of Detroit.

Councilwoman JoAnn Watson was the only council person who verbally supported including writing a letter to Snyder requesting the federal dollars that had been sent to the State of Michigan by President Obama for the various cities.(NOW ALL OF THESE CITIES and their schools are under EMERGENCY MANAGERS). Councilwoman Watson also requested the repayment of the millions of dollars that Dennis Archer had loaned to Engler because that State was in a financial crisis.

Protest against Snyder appearance in Detroit targets PA 4, then on the ballot as Prop 1. It was soundly defeated, but replaced by Snyder and the legislature with PA 436.

In November of 2012 at the General Election, the citizens of Michigan in a state-wide vote said NO to the Financial Manager law [PA4] which disallowed the Emergency Managers BUT during the last two weeks December of 2012 when the legislature body of the State of Michigan were on their Holiday break, Snyder and some republican comrades placed in an illegal emergency manager law that need not have required number of votes plus they also voted in an illegal RIGHT TO WORK law to bust the unions in this state.

March outside bankruptcy hearing Oct. 23, 2013 targets apartheid-style policies of Snyder, banks.

It was under these illegal laws that emergency managers have been placed in the predominantly black populated cities with a predominantly black elected officials. This sounds to me like the beginning of suppressing the votes of the minorities in this grand plot to take over these cities and institute “apartheid” in these cities where too many minorities did not vote in 2010, 2013 elections because they felt it was a waste of time. (Mind controlling and blinding the eyes of some minority voters.)

Everyone’s assistance is needed to get this information out with the documentation to STOP APARTHEID TACTICS in the State of Michigan. Please feel free to forward this information to the NATIONAL NEWS MEDIA or even the INTERNATIONAL MEDIA to bring attention to what has occurred and attempting to still occur in Michigan. The local news media — TV, RADIO, and NEWSPAPER refuse to tell the citizens of Michigan and the court system within the state is controlled by snyder and the NERD fund.

Mike Duggan’s illegal 2013 primary election where more than 40% of the write-in ballots were in the same handwriting — criminal complaints were filed for the illegal, unconstitutional expulsion of legal election challengers from Detroit Cobo Hall when they discovered the election software rigging an the stuffing of the ballots with more votes in the election machines than actual paper ballots that were fed into the machines. This was also discovered in the 10 other election receiving boards in Detroit where in one case in Detroit District One 400 people voted but the machine software showed over 800 votes.

FROM DETROIT’S CHANNEL FOUR: CLICK ON DETROIT

January 31, 2013

Renowned leader Angela Davis as she is today. Such hairstyles are celebrated in Black culture.

WARREN, Mich. – A Warren police officer has been fired after a confrontation with a woman which led to the officer cutting the woman’s hair.

Charda Gregory, of Detroit, was arrested for allegedly damaging a motel room and then damaging a police car.

Police video shows officer Bernadette Najor cutting Gregory’s hair weave while Gregory is restrained in a chair. She reportedly did it to reduce the risk of suicide.

Charges against Gregory were dismissed. Officer Najor was suspended and then fired.

http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/warren-cop-fired-after-video-of-her-cutting-suspects-hair/-/1719418/24227088/-/l4nr3rz/-/index.html

(VOD: Only the one officer was fired, but the others are clearly complicit as shown on the video. They should all be charged with assault and with a hate crime. This abominable action was clearly motivated by racial animosity towards a Black woman and her hair style of choice. The importance of hair grooming in African-American culture has been well-documented.)

Families grieve for Aiyana Jones and Jerean Blake on Facebook pages.

Theory at trial of Chauncey Owens, Charles Jones names Owens’ brother

 Witness says driver of moped with two men on it shot Blake; Sh’rron Hurt testifies he was that driver; other witnesses say Owens was the shooter 

Improper communication about testimony between witnesses who identified Owens heard outside courtroom and photographed

 By Diane Bukowski 

February 1, 2013 

DETROIT – An alternate theory of the killing of Jerean Blake, 17, in 2010 emerged from testimony during the second and third days of the first-degree murder trial of Charles Jones, father of Aiyana Jones, 7 when she was killed by Detroit police, and Chauncey Owens. It was accompanied by several contradictory accounts of the events.

It was not Owens, but his brother Sh’rron Hurt, nicknamed “Chinaman,” who shot him to death, according to an eyewitness description and an alleged statement from an acquaintance of Hurt’s, now in prison, detailing what Hurt told him about the case.

Sh’rron Hurt is at left talking to witnesses James Liddell (in red) and Sylvester Bell, along with police officer in center, during lunch break at trial. Bell and Liddell were presented as neutral witnesses, but appear to have been quite comfortable with Hurt and police. Bell testified that the officer told him he had done “a good job” on the stand. Liddell and Bell said they identified Chauncey Owens as the killer.

Hurt testified that he drove a moped, with his “best” or “good” friend named “Chris,” whose last name he said he did not know, to the parking lot where Blake died. All witnesses have said a second moped accompanied a moped with one man on it to the scene.

Hurt said he saw Owens arguing with Blake, then spoke with Blake to find out what had occurred after Owens left. Hurt said he returned to his own residence on Lillibridge, across the street from the upper flat where Owens lived, and saw Owens and Jones emerge from an SUV. He claimed he heard Owens say, “That’s how you do it, n—a.”

Owens lived upstairs from the flat where Aiyana Jones died during a military assault by Detroit police two days after Blake’s death, on May 16, 2010. (Raid is shown below in video from “The First 48,” introduced last year at the trial of Detroit police officer Joseph Weekley for Aiyana’s filling.) Aiyana’s aunt Krystal Sanders told VOD that when police came to the entrance to that flat, where she lived with Owens,  they said they were looking for Owens and “Chinaman.”

Hurt said he put his moped inside the lower flat of his house and called his wife to come get him to take him to his other residence in suburban Centerline. He said he was speaking with two men in a black car in the street when Owens and Jones arrived.

“Isn’t it a common thing, that when you get in trouble, you go to Centerline?” Owens’ defense attorney David Cripps asked Hurt, who denied that was the case. Cripps asked if he put the moped inside to hide it, and whether he gave his weapon to the two men in the car. Hurt denied that description of events.

Sh’rron “Chinaman” Hurt alternated between this home in Centerline and his flat across the street from the Jones family on poverty-stricken Lillibridge, according to internet records.

Hurt identified Charles Howard from a prison photo and said he knew him, but had not seen him for months.

“Didn’t you have conversations with Mr. Howard that a couple of guys tried to rob you of your Birdman moped bike and that you went back to your Lillibridge house and put up the bike, then went back?” asked Cripps. “You told Charlie Howard you shot that young man. Did you later tell him [Howard] after the shooting what you had done?”

Hurt again denied the allegation.

Hurt said he turned himself in to police the morning of Aiyana’s death after hearing from others that he was being sought in the case. He said police showed him a video of Owens’ interrogation and told him Owens had identified him, and that he was angry and hurt that he would do so.

Former assistant police chief Ralph Godbee addresses media about Aiyana’s killing on May 17, 2010. Mayor Dave Bing barred any further use of reality TV camera crews after the raid, but never met with the Jones family to express his condolences.

In fact, court records earlier reviewed by VOD show that police coerced Owens into NOT identifying his brother, after Owens found out that Aiyana had been killed during the events surrounding his own arrest.

(VOD–if the alternate theory of Blake’s killing is true, the Detroit police would have strong motivation to stick to their contention that Jones and Owens are guilty, since they would have raided not only the wrong flat looking for Jerean’s killer as they were starring on “The First 48,” but the wrong house.)

Prior to that discovery, Owens denied any knowledge of the killing. He later pled guilty to second-degree murder with a pledge in writing to “tell the truth,” which has been taken by the daily media to mean that Charles Jones gave him the gun to kill Blake. But Owens refused to testify against Jones during Jones’ preliminary exam a year and a half after Aiyana’s death, and the prosecution withdrew his plea deal.

Community members futilely protested the opening of a liquor store so close to Southeastern High School, shown here.

Shortly after Hurt’s testimony, Devon Lawson, now 21, a friend of Blake’s from Southeastern High School, testified that it was the driver of the moped with two people on it who argued with Blake and later shot at him.

Lawson said Blake bumped into the man, who he did not know. He called the driver “Chauncey Owens” at one point, but said he knew that name only from news reports.

“Then there was an argument, words were exchanged, the two men hopped on the moped,” Lawson testified. “One had a black do-rag [on] with an orange shirt. I didn’t know him and couldn’t recognize him.”

He said a “coppertone” Suburban truck entered the lot about four minutes later.

Mike’s Motor City Marketplace, site of Jerean Blake’s killing May 14, 2010.

“Four men jumped out of the truck, and the driver had a gun,” he said. “Everybody ran, then I heard gunshots and I looked behind me and saw [Je’Rean] with blood coming out of his back.”

He said the shooter had been on the moped with two men on it, both of whom he said came back in the Suburban along with the other two individuals.

Other witnesses have testified adamantly that the shooter was Owens, the man by himself on a moped, even pointing him out in the courtroom. However, they have given different descriptions of Owens.

Blake’s classmates testified Jan. 28 that the shooter had braids, with one testifying that he had a mustache and goatee (which Hurt does have). Owens’ fiancée told VOD she had lived with him for 17 years, and that he never wore braids or a beard. Witnesses have also testified variously that only the driver got out of the truck, or that all those in the truck got out. They have said the shooter wore a white T-shirt or an orange shirt, and had on either a “do-rag” or a baseball cap.

Sites of Aiyana Jones and Jerean Blake’s deaths, close to Southeastern High School.

Two witnesses, Sylvester Bell and James Liddell, who testified on the second day, adamantly identified Owens as the killer from the stand.  The two said they were at Bell’s father’s office next to the liquor store after getting off work.

They said they picked Owens out of a photo line-up in which he has very short hair and no beard. They said they did so the day after Blake’s killing, while they were at their construction jobsite, and while a cameraman from “The First 48” TV show recorded the events.

Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Richard Skutt, who is hearing the case, said he would issue an order for “The First 48” representatives to produce the relevant audio and/or videotapes. The presence of the cameramen was unknown previously to them, both the prosecution and defense attorneys said.

Bell also said he saw a man with braids put his head out of the back of the truck and yell that they would come back and shoot the place up if anybody had further problems with them. Wayne County Prosecutor Robert Moran said Liddell told him during a break that he could no longer remember anything about the incident, and did not want to testify. Moran attempted to have Liddell’s earlier testimony entered into the record instead, but Skutt ruled that Liddell would have to take the stand to be examined about his issues. When he did, he gave a version of events practically identical to that given by Bell

Was Detroit police rush to catch ANYONE in Blake killing due to A & E’s slogan?

During a break in the proceedings, Bell was heard [by this reporter] saying loudly in the court hallway to Hurt and Liddell, “I could only see two of the people in the truck.” They were joined shortly afterward by a Sgt. Williams, who sat in the front row while the three testified. On the stand, Bell told Owens’ defense attorney David Cripps that they had not discussed the case, and that Williams told him, “You did a good job.”

The three witnesses and the officer were also photographed outside the Frank Murphy Hall during the lunch break in a group (see second photo from top of story), having an animated discussion and smoking. When Cripps showed a cellphone with the photo to Bell, saying it looked like they were shaking hands, Williams, seated next to this reporter on one side, and in close proximity to the jury on the other side, whispered loudly twice, “Cripps is lying.”

Another classmate of JeRean’s, Amber Holloway, now 19, was the final witness this week.

She said she was in a car with Blake and three others, driven by Jacquavis Richards (J-Roc), when they went to the store. She said she saw Charles Jones in the front passenger seat of the truck, from where she sat in the front passenger seat of Richards’ truck. She said she first recognized him when she saw a television news report showing Jones after his daughter’s death at a press conference, and told her mother she recognized him.

Charles Jones in court.

She pointed to Jones in the courtroom, although he has gained as much as 60 lbs. since that time and looks much different.

She said she picked Jones out of a line-up 11 months after the incident. Contradicting testimony given earlier by Richards, she said repeatedly that the truck was parked in a space right next to Richards’ car, with Blake sandwiched in between the two vehicles.

Richards testified earlier that the truck had pulled into the parking lot so that its back was behind the back of his car, and that he could only observe people exiting the truck by looking through the passenger side rear view mirror of his car.

After his testimony, Richards and other classmates of Blake’s sat with his mother Lyvonne “Coolamama” Cargill in the audience. Cargill has repeatedly claimed adamantly on her Facebook page that Owens and Jones murdered her son. She was not at the scene and admitted during her testimony that she originally told police “some kids” at the scene identified someone named “Scooter” as the killer.

This is the photo originally used by the Detroit News with story on the deaths of young people in Detroit. Taken by an amateur photographer, it shows Aiyana’s grandmother Mertilla Jones clutching the child’s tennis shoes during a vigil after her death.

She has aimed bitter acrimony not only at Owens and Jones but at the entire Jones family, during a multitude of radio talk shows and on Facebook. A Facebook site called “Justice for Jerean Blake” recently claimed that the Detroit News originally ran a photo of Mertilla Jones and her granddaughter Aiyana with a recent article on the rampant deaths of young people in Detroit. It said Cargill called the News to complain, and they replaced it with a photo of herself and her daughter taken at the courtroom.

That photo is now, however, a photo of Cargill sitting next to Richards during trial proceedings. Richards has his face covered as if in grief, but it is also possible that he did not want his picture taken. It is unusual for news photographers to take photos in the audience during a trial.

Jerean Blake’s mother is shown sitting with Jerean’s friend Jacquavis (J-Roc) Richards during trial in this Detroit News photo.

The site says, “Why did Karen Bouffard [the News reporter] mention the name of Officer Joe Weekley whose gun ACCIDENTALLY went off during a raid and did not mention by name the names of the MURDERERS CHAUNCEY OWENS AND CHARLES JONES who are on trial RIGHT NOW for VIOLENTLY murdering a child?!?!?”

Whether Weekley’s gun “accidentally” went off is still in question, as is the guilt of Owens and Jones. Weekley’s trial on manslaughter charges last June ended in a hung jury and he is presumably still to be re-tried. His jury had only one Black member.

Two juries, one for each of the defendants, will have the final say in the Owens/Jones trial, during which numerous instances of “reasonable doubt” have evidently emerged. In a change from the juries usually picked in the Third Circuit Court, both juries have substantial African-American representation. Owens’ jury has four Black women, two Black men, five white men, and three white women. Jones’ jury has four Black women, two Black men, three white men, and five white women.

President Barack Obama after his State of the Union address Jan. 29, 2014

 By BAR executive editor Glen Ford

 January 29, 2014 

 “When you say ‘jobs,’ he says tax cuts – just like the Republicans, only Obama first cites the pain of the unemployed, so that you know he cares.”

“Believe it,” said the current Prevaricator-in-Chief, in the conclusion to his annual litany of lies. President Obama’s specialty, honed to theatrical near-perfection over five disastrous years, is in crafting the sympathetic lie, designed to suspend disbelief among those targeted for oblivion, through displays of empathy for the victims. In contrast to the aggressive insults and bluster employed by Republican political actors, whose goal is to incite racist passions against the Other, the sympathetic Democratic liar disarms those who are about to be sacrificed by pretending to feel their pain.

Moratorium NOW! protests banks bail-out in Washington, D.C.

Barack Obama, who has presided over the sharpest increases in economic inequality in U.S. history, adopts the persona of public advocate, reciting wrongs inflicted by unseen and unknown forces that have “deepened” the gap between the rich and the rest of us and “stalled” upward mobility. Having spent half a decade stuffing tens of trillions of dollars into the accounts of an ever shrinking gaggle of financial capitalists, Obama declares this to be “a year of action” in the opposite direction. “Believe it.” And if you do believe it, then crown him the Most Effective Liar of the young century.

Lies of omission are even more despicable than the overt variety, because they hide. The potentially most devastating Obama contribution to economic inequality is being crafted in secret by hundreds of corporate lobbyists and lawyers and their revolving-door counterparts in government.

“The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, described as ‘NAFTA on steroids,’ would accelerate the global Race to the Bottom.”

The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, described as “NAFTA on steroids,” would accelerate the global Race to the Bottom that has made a wasteland of American manufacturing, plunging the working class into levels of poverty and insecurity without parallel in most people’s lifetimes, and totally eviscerating the meager gains of three generations of African Americans.

Yet, the closest Obama came to even an oblique allusion to his great crime-in-the-making, was to announce that “new trade partnerships with Europe and the Asia-Pacific will help [small businesses] create even more jobs. We need to work together on tools like bipartisan trade promotion authority to protect our workers, protect our environment and open new markets to new goods stamped ‘Made in the USA.’” Like NAFTA twenty years ago – only far bigger and more diabolically destructive – TPP will have the opposite effect, destroying millions more jobs and further deepening worker insecurity. The Trans Pacific Partnership expands the legal basis for global economic inequalities – which is why the negotiations are secret, and why the treaty’s name could not be spoken in the State of the Union address. It is a lie of omission of global proportions. Give Obama his crown.

The president who promised in his 2008 campaign to support a hike in the minimum wage to $9.50 by 2011, and then did nothing at all to make it happen, says this is the “year of action” when he’ll move heaven and earth to get a $10.10 minimum. He will start, Obama told the Congress and the nation, by issuing “an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay their federally-funded employees a fair wage of at least $10.10 an hour because if you cook our troops’ meals or wash their dishes, you should not have to live in poverty.”

Detroit fast food workers march for $15 minimum wage with benefits.

Obama neglected to mention that only new hires – a small fraction, beginning with zero, of the two million federal contract workers – will get the wage boost; a huge and conscious lie of omission. The fact that the president does not even propose a gradual, mandated increase for the rest of the two million shows he has no intention of using his full powers to ameliorate taxpayer-financed poverty. We can also expect Obama to issue waivers to every firm that claims a hardship, as is always his practic

What is Obama’s jobs program? It is the same as laid out at last year’s State of the Union, and elaborated on last summer: lower business taxes and higher business subsidies. When you say “jobs,” he says tax cuts – just like the Republicans, only Obama first cites the pain of the unemployed, so that you know he cares. “Both Democrats and Republicans have argued that our tax code is riddled with wasteful, complicated loopholes that punish businesses investing here, and reward companies that keep profits abroad. Let’s flip that equation. Let’s work together to close those loopholes, end those incentives to ship jobs overseas, and lower tax rates for businesses that create jobs right here at home.” Actually, Obama wants to lower tax rates for all corporations to 28 percent, from 35 percent, as part of his ongoing quest for a Grand Bargain with Republicans. For Obama, the way to bring jobs back to the U.S. is to make American taxes and wages more “competitive” in the “global marketplace” – the Race to the Bottom.

 In the final analysis, the sympathetic corporate Democrat and the arrogant corporate Republican offer only small variations on the same menu: ever increasing austerity. Obama bragged about reducing the deficit, never acknowledging that this has been accomplished on the backs of the poor, contributing mightily to economic inequality and social insecurity.

Obama offers nothing of substance, because he is not authorized by his corporate masters to do so. He takes his general orders from the same people as do the Republicans. That’s why Obama only speaks of minimum wage hikes while Republicans are in power, rather than when his own party controlled both houses of Congress. Grand Bargains are preferred, because they are the result of consensus between the two corporate parties. In effect, the Grand Bargain is the distilled political will of Wall Street, which feeds the donkey and the elephant. Wall Street – the 1 percent – believes the world is theirs for the taking, and they want all of it. Given this overarching truth, Obama has no choice but to stage a festival of lies.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com  

Pres. Barack Obama at top, with California prisoners loaded in like slaves, Amir El-Amin and Leonard Peltier at bottom.

BARACK OBAMA, THE STATE OF THE UNION AND THE PRISON STATE

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

“…Obama campaigned in 2007 and 2008 saying he would pass legislation raising the minimum wage…”

In the days before this year’s State of the Union address, we heard a lot about how Barack Obama was finally about to unleash the mighty executive powers of his office to accomplish some of the many great things he’s always wanted to accomplish, those mostly unspecified things which evil and immoral Republicans have prevented him from doing. From long experience dating back at least to the Clinton era, the White House and Democratic party know this is an attractive picture to many, one that conveniently excuses Democrats in office from even trying to accomplish the real demands of the millions who vote them into office.

Barack Obama campaigned in 2007 and 2008 saying he would pass legislation raising the minimum wage and making it easier to organize unions so people could stand up for their own rights in the workplace. The president apparently lied. Once in office with a thumping majority in both houses of Congress the president promptly froze the wages of federal workers, and made no move to protect union organizing or to raise the minimum wage. Four and five years later, with the House of Representatives safely under Republican control, the president has begun to make noises about how “America deserves a raise” and has finally declared that federal contract workers will soon have to be paid a minimum of $10.10 per hour.

Although Barack Obama’s career, and those of the entire black political class are founded on the notion that they and the Democratic party somehow “represent” the aspirations and political power of African Americans, the policy concerns of black America were nowhere to be found in last night’s state of the union. The speech contained no mention of the persistent gap between black and white unemployment, or the widening gaps between black and white wealth, and reaffirmed his commitment to “Race To The Top” an initiative to privatize public education in poorer communities across the country.

” Obama could halt the construction and opening of the new federal supermax prison…”

Thomson Supermax prison in Illinois.

And of course, no cluster of issues impact black America more savagely and disproportionately than police practices, the drug war and the prison state. African Americans are one eighth the US population, but more than 40% of its prisons and jails. Together with Latinos, who are another eighth and make up nearly 30% of US prisoners, people of color are a quarter of the US population and more than 70% of the locked down. No cluster of issues would benefit more from a few presidential initiatives and well placed strokes of the pen than police practices, the drug war and the prison state.

Here are just a handful of things President Obama and his party could and would do, things that Republicans are powerless to prevent, which would make a large and lasting impact upon the communities they purportedly represent.

Prisoners at California’s Pelican Bay Supermax isolation unit, who have initated two state-wide hunger strikes in the last three years.

With the stroke of a presidential pen, Barack Obama could halt the construction and opening of the new federal supermax prison at ADX Thomson in Illinois, also called “Gitmo North.” Citizen activists in the president’s home state last year managed to close down the state’s brutal supermax prison at Tamms because they know that supermax prisons do not rehabilitate, they are instruments of torture pure and simple. Ordinary citizens know that torture should not be a career, or a business governments engage in. Even Obama’s own Bureau of Prisons is on record as wanting to examine whether the regimes in supermax prisons across the country constitute torture. It’s time to look for that presidential pen.

Detroit police Gestapo raid on Colony Arms Apts. Nov. 2013, occupied by Black youth and their families.

The president could take public notice of the alarming militarization of police forces across the country and the wave of police shootings of civilians. Far more persons die in the US of police gunfire than of terrorist incidents and school shootings. The feds play an enormous role in the funding, training and arming of thousands of local police departments across the country, through its grants to the state-level training and certification agencies, and its authorization of the sale of military equipment to police departments. The result is that every county and town in the US now has a SWAT team, employing shoot-first-question-later tactics, and although African Americans are far from the only victims of unchecked police violence, a black person is killed by police, security officers or vigilantes once every 28 hours. Again, this is a case for a presidential statement, a few orders to underlings and that mighty executive pen.

The president could order his Justice Department to reconsider its objections to the retroactive reduction of unfair and disproportionate sentences to crack cocaine defendants. When the president signed the so-called Fair Sentencing Act reducing the crack to powder cocaine penalty ratio from 100 to 1 to 18 to 1 thousands of defendants should have been eligible for immediate release. But Obama’s and Eric Holder’s Justice Departments have gone to court repeatedly to keep them behind bars. Our civil rights establishment from the Mark Morials and Al Sharptons down, seem more invested in the prestige of the president than doing justice to prisoners, and so have politely refused to call Obama and Holder on this glaring disconnect between their public pronouncements and their actual policies. The mighty presidential pen in the hands of Barack Obama could have made a big difference here any time in the last several years, and still can, if only he will.

Jamil Al-Amin, formerly H. Rap Brown

The president could use his mighty executive powers to release some long-time political prisoners. There’s Iman Jamil Al-Amin, the former H. Rap Brown who distinguished himself laying the foundations for what passes for black political empowerment, risking his life registering voters and conducting Freedom Schools in rural Alabama with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the mid and early 1960s. After repeated attempts by Georgia officials in the 1990s to frame Al-Amin for shootings, one of these stuck long enough to get a shaky conviction in 1999. As pressure for a retrial from local community activists built up and even in the face of protests from establishment figures like former Atlanta mayor, congressman and ambassador Andy Young, Georgia officials transferred Al-Amin into federal custody in the dead of night, and the feds spirited him away to the hellhole at ADX Florence in Colorado where he has been for more than a decade. With a stroke of that might executive pen, President Obama could send Al-Amin back to Georgia where his family and attorneys could visit him, and pressure would mount on Georgia authorities to give him a new trial, in which he might well prove his innocence.

Leonard Peltier.

The president could pardon or grant clemency to Leonard Peltier, a Native American leader who has served a decade longer in prison than Nelson Mandela did for an offense that nobody at his trial even alleged he actually committed. Peltier is recognized around the world as a political prisoner. His continued imprisonment shows that many wounds from the 60s and 70s were never healed, and his release would demonstrate that this president acknowledges the need for this healing. After almost 40 years, Leonard Peltier surely deserves to come home.

President Obama could acknowledge the wave of hunger strikes and protests in prisons across the country, and name a commission to investigate how we can reverse the expansion of prisons, guarantee the re-absorption of former prisoners into society, and reverse the culture and law which discriminate against and punish former prisoners and their families for the rest of their lives. Right now a number of prisoners at Menard Penitentiary in the president’s home state of Illinois are waging a hunger strike, with demands that differ little from those raised by prisoners in California’s Pelican Bay last year, and those in Virginia, Georgia, Ohio and elsewhere.

Venezuela Coro prison orchestra gives hope to inmates.

We must not imagine that rolling back the carceral state is something no government on earth has ever done. Right now in Venezuela, that nation is confronting a crisis of crime, the practical limits of prison expansion, and of what kind of society they want to build. They’re taking a different path than so-called “progressives” here, who seem upset only about prisoners who are factually “innocent” and only about prisons if they’re privatized. Venezuela is frankly committed to shrinking its prison population and exploring models of restorative rather than punitive justice. There really are other ways to go, if we have the will and the vision our Democrats and Republicans lack.

Obama’s Attorney General has learned how to let the words “mass incarceration” roll off his lips fluently, after his recent discovery that such a thing actually exists. The president opined that Trayvon Martin could have been his own son, minus the status, the privilege, the neighborhood and a few other things. But that mighty presidential pen that can call commissions, impose directives, re-set priorities and make all manner of changes by executive order, changes that no evil and immoral Republicans can block or reverse, at least until they re-take the oval office, is still in that desk drawer, or wherever Barack Obama keeps it. He hasn’t found it the last five years in office. Maybe he will discover it in these last three.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and serves on the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. He lives and works in Marietta GA and can be contacted via this site’s contact page, or at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com.

“A triple tragedy”

Charles Jones, father of Aiyana Jones, killed by police at the age of seven, and Chauncey Owens face first-degree murder charges  

Witnesses say Blake’s killer had braids, which Owens never wore, and that ‘some kids’ at scene called him ‘Scooter’ 

Two “jail-house snitches” to testify

By Diane Bukowski 

January 29, 2012 

Toys in front yard of Aiyana’s grandmother’s home are same ones seen in evidence tech photos at trial of Officer Joseph Weekley. Photo by Diane Bukowski May 16, 2010

DETROIT – Who killed Je’Rean Blake, 17, two days before police stormed the home of seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley Jones’ grandmother and shot the child to death with a submachine gun on May 16, 2010, looking for the killer, as cameras from A & E’s “First 48” TV series rolled?

During opening statements at the first-degree murder trial of Charles Jones and Chauncey Owens Jan. 28, Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Mark Hindelang said Owens, who lived in a flat upstairs from Aiyana’s grandmother, killed the teen during a confrontation outside Mike’s Motor City Marketplace at Mack and St. Jean on Detroit’s east side. He said Aiyana’s father, Charles Jones, gave Owens the gun.

Store where Blake was killed, at Mack and St. Jean

He said Blake’s classmates at Southeastern High School, who were with Je’Rean, Owen’s half-brother Sherrod Heard, and two convicted prisoners would testify for the prosecution regarding the guilt of the two men.

Attorneys Leon Weiss, representing Jones, and David Cripps, representing Owens, said the prosecution would fall far short of proving their case “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Jay Schlenkerman

Quasim Raqib and victim Shelly Hilliard

They said they expected contradictory statements from the witnesses. They condemned the use of “jail-house snitches” Jay Schlenkerman, convicted of ten felonies and awaiting sentencing on the last three, and Quasim Raquib, serving time for killing and dismembering a transgendered woman, who made a written agreement to lessen charges in that case in exchange for his testimony.

“There are three tragedies here,” Weiss said. “The loss of Je’Rean Blake’s life, the loss of my client’s daughter, and the fact that a couple of years after the homicides of Je’rean Blake and Aiyana Jones, the government charges my client, an innocent man, with murder.”

Lyvonne Cargill with son’s ashes.

Cripps added, “Things are not as pure and clear as the prosecution suggests.” He said the eyewitnesses claim the shooter had braided hear, although Owens has never worn braids. He said press coverage showing Jones after his daughter’s death, and the witnesses’ later view of Owens in court, led to their identification of him, and that Owens’ half-brother wrongly thought Owens had identified him as the killer.

Lyvonne Cargill, Blake’s mother, took the stand apparently already in bad shape. She broke down sobbing loudly as she described getting a call from her son to come pick him up at the store, just blocks from their home, rushing to the scene, and finding a crowd of teens putting him in his friend’s car. She said she drove the car to St. John’s Hospital at high speeds, only to learn that Blake was “dead on arrival.”

Cargill exited the courtroom temporarily, crying “My baby, my baby,” as jurors were excused. Prior to her testimony, a medical examiner testified Blake died from one gunshot wound to the chest which hit his lungs and heart.

Photo from Facebook page for Je’Rean Blake

On cross exam by Cripps, Cargill reluctantly admitted she gave police a written, signed statement that day in which she said “some kids I don’t know who they are were saying Scooter shot my son.” The statement said the shooter was “light-skinned with braids.”

During her testimony, the prosecution displayed a photo of Blake in his Southeastern High School J-ROTC uniform on a screen. They earlier claimed it was the only one they had, despite the fact that the news media has long used a nice portrait head shot of Blake.

(VOD: photos on a Facebook page “G.I.H. Je’Rean Blake,” mounted as a tribute to him and other teens who also had tragically short lives, including one nicknamed “Scoota G,” show another version of Blake. This is raised not to condone this child’s killing, but in sorrow for the many killings of young Detroiters, caught up in a society that offers them little hope of living productive lives as adults.) 

Blake’s older sister Aisha Blake sadly said she accompanied her mother to the scene, where she saw a group of “75 to 100” teens in the middle of Mack surrounding her brother as he lay on the ground. 

Blake’s girl-friend Johnise Allen, 15 at the time, and friend Jacquavis Richards (a/k/a J-Roc), who is now 21, adamantly identified Owens as the shooter during their testimony, with Allen pointing to him. They testified they had driven with Blake in Richards’ car with other Southeastern students to a McDonald’s and then to the liquor store.

They both said they had frequented the store and that the management regularly locked the doors to prevent too many students from entering at the same time. Allen admitted fights were frequent there, while Richards said the owner was concerned about his inventory. The two said they saw Owens, who they had not seen previously, get out of a truck with a “silver revolver” and shoot at Blake after a verbal confrontation.

Allen said Owens was wearing an orange shirt and blue jeans, while Richards said he wore a white T-shirt. Both said the shooter had braids. Richards said he also had a mustache and goatee.

On cross-exam, Allen said that after Blake got out of the car, she witnessed an argument involving a girl a few feet away from them. She said Blake then told her he had “words” with two men on mopeds, and she told him to get in the car.

“By the time we got done talking,” Allen said, “a truck pulled up that I never saw before.” She said four men get out, and the driver shot at Blake. She said the incident took place in a matter of seconds.

Allen said police had never brought her to a live line-up or shown her photos to identify Owens. She said she had seen him in court “once.”

“You were told that that was one of the defendants, that he was the one who did the shooting?” Cripps asked her. Allen said “Yes.”

On cross by Cripps, Richards said he observed the incident through the passenger side rear view mirror of his car as he sat in the driver’s seat, with another student sitting in the front passenger seat. He said he had a four-door Honda Civic which he had parked in the middle of the lot, facing towards Mack, and that he saw the truck drive into the lot and park behind his car facing the store.

He said he did not see the alleged altercation between Blake and the two men on the mopeds earlier and did not know any of the men in the truck.

“Four people got out [of the truck], two on the passenger side and two on the driver’s side,” he testified. “I saw the driver. He drawed his gun and shot off twice, about 10 feet away from Je’Rean.” He said he did not see where the driver got the gun from.

He testified first that Je’Rean was standing by the passenger door of his car, and later on cross that Je’Rean “took off running” when the truck pulled up. Cripps confronted him about that testimony, telling him that Blake was not shot in the back but in the front of his chest.

Richards also said police had never brought him to an in-person line-up or showed him photos to have him identify Owens.

“I identified him because I saw him shoot my friend,” he said. 

The trial is set to continue today.